Ever had a beer that tastes better half way through fermentation ?

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hugcra

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Have you ever tried a beer half way through fermentation and loved the taste ? Only to try that same beer a few days later to find the flavour has changed ? Some times it changes for the better and sadly some times not...

I currently have two beers under fermentation and love the taste of one of them so much so that I am considering cold crashing it over the weekend.
 
What??? Why on earth would you cc halfway through? You will end up with bottle bombs, assuming you bottle. Either way, it will be a shit beer. Leave it alone to finish up.

I'm guessing you like the taste before the yeasties eat most of the sugar, you like it sweet?
 
A lot of my beers taste awesome half way through fermentation. I have an oatmeal stout I brewed 3 days ago and sampled it last night and its bloody good. But as wbosher said you still have to let it ferment out.
 
It also depends on the yeast and the style. Some UK styles are meant to be drunk as soon as they are cleared and conditioned, which could be as little as 10 days from pitching. I've often found that the keg beer tastes fine, then on getting out a bottle of "archive" from the same batch it's pretty meh. That's one reason I rarely enter comps nowadays as I've gone right out of bottling and sold my CPBF a couple of years ago.

However I've actually never tried a glass of half fermented stuff - apparently entire batches of half-to-almost fermented home brew are skulled (on the quiet) in Indigenous communities in "dry" areas according to a friend who worked at Kowanyama. I expect that pellagra (vitamin B3 deficiency) isn't an endemic disease there :ph34r:

Edit: one style that can benefit from being kegged early is cider from a kit like blackrock. Mate on Bribie Island would make a kit with extra sugar - not dex - and keg it while it was still a bit sweet but at 5% and it was as good as a pub cider on tap.
 
Nah i like it hoppie, but the hop flavour has disapated in some brews. I keg also. I will let them end their fermentation, always do. I was mearly starting a thread.
 
The quality of beer is in the eye of the drinker i think. No such thing as shit beer. If someone likes it then its good.
 
hugcra said:
The quality of beer is in the eye of the drinker i think. No such thing as shit beer. If someone likes it then its good.
I may have got the wrong end of the stick here, I apologise if that is the case, but I assumed you were talking about CCing mid way through fermentation. If that is the case, it would be a very shit beer.
 
I agree mate. Just a thought or topic i put out there for diliberation.
 
You say you like hoppy beers, are you adding additional hops, or brewing the kit as per instructions? There are quite a few guys here that do extract brewing that could help you out if your doing just the kit.

You could try dry hopping once fermentation is completed also.
 
hugcra said:
Nah i like it hoppie, but the hop flavour has disapated in some brews. I keg also. I will let them end their fermentation, always do. I was mearly starting a thread.
You're not crazy. I can't work out how to get around this myself. I come across it most often when tasting a dry hopped, green beer on bottling day. Big punchy hop taste straight out of the tank, then by the time its bottle conditioned the flavour and aroma have all but disappeared. Apparently the C02 released during fermentation (or on opening the bottle) "scrubs" some of the flavour molecules out of the beer.

Tried adding more hops but that gets expensive and the phenols in the hops negatively effect the clarity of the beer. Looks like I gotta invest in a keg system and force carbonate.

Then again I'm only on my 7th brew so maybe I'm missing something.

Edit: Wbosher's right though dry hopping will help some, just make sure you drop the hops in the fermenter after your initial fermentation has calmed down. I usually do it on day 5 or in secondary if I'm doing one. Separately boiling some hops on flavour addition timescales (20min, 15min, 10min etc) and adding those to the fermenter after initial fermentation may help too but I haven't tried this.
 
wbosher said:
You say you like hoppy beers, are you adding additional hops, or brewing the kit as per instructions? There are quite a few guys here that do extract brewing that could help you out if your doing just the kit.

You could try dry hopping once fermentation is completed also.
Ive been doing alot of parcials and mini mashs, with hops added as per recipe, i think i will rack this current one into a cube and throw in a hop bag for a few weeks. It may be just the style of beer or poor recipe choice for my pallet.
 
Masha said:
You're not crazy. I can't work out how to get around this myself. I come across it most often when tasting a dry hopped, green beer on bottling day. Big punchy hop taste straight out of the tank, then by the time its bottle conditioned the flavour and aroma have all but disappeared. Apparently the C02 released during fermentation (or on opening the bottle) "scrubs" some of the flavour molecules out of the beer.

Tried adding more hops but that gets expensive and the phenols in the hops negatively effect the clarity of the beer. Looks like I gotta invest in a keg system and force carbonate.

Then again I'm only on my 7th brew so maybe I'm missing something.

Edit: Bosher's right though dry hopping will help some, just make sure you drop the hops in the fermenter after your initial fermentation has calmed down. I usually do it on day 5 or in secondary if I'm doing one. Separately boiling some hops on flavour addition timescales (20min, 15min, 10min etc) and adding those to the fermenter after initial fermentation may help too but I haven't tried this.
Haha, i new i wouldnt be the only one. Dry hopping in the secondary is the next thing i will try. Ill let you know.

How much difference in flavour concentration is there in fresh hops, flowers, and pellets?
 
"How much difference in flavour concentration is there in fresh hops, flowers, and pellets?"

I've never used whole hops myself, but differencewise, not much as far as I've read. It's funny basically every recommendation I've heard from commercial brewers down has been to use pellets. Seems that fresh hops or dried flowers are more variable handfull to handfull than homogenised pellets, plus whole hops take up a ton of space in the kettle/fermenter with the dried ones absorbing a fair chunk of your precious wort/beer too.

Having said that I'm keen to give whole hops a go first chance I get.

Oh I did have an idea to throw a whole cone in each bottle to kind of gimmick-up a future brew but apparently this has the same effect as putting a Mentos in a bottle of Coke (check youtube if you don't know what I mean) so maybe I'll hold off on the idea til I do an "April Fools Brew".
 
Ever noticed a keg tastes better when it is nearly empty
Maybe i should tip the top half out :D
 

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